VMware Refreshes Cloud Management Platform

I recently met with Marke Leake, senior director of product marketing for the Cloud Management business unit at VMware to talk about the launch of VMware’s latest vRealize Suite 7, VMware’s cloud management platform. The suite is an enterprise-level hybrid cloud management platform designed to enable IT to better manage both on-premise and hybrid cloud infrastructures as well as enabling faster automated deployment of applications and services.

Marke pointed out that since Q4 2015 VMware has completely refreshed all of the components in the vRealize Suite. These updates are the result of months’ worth of interviews and surveys with their existing customer engagements.

The vRealize Suite 7 release updates two of the main components of their vRealize Suite: vRealize Operations 6.2 and vRealize Log Insight 3.3. In Q4 2015 VMware delivered updates to the other two members of the suite: vRealize Automation 7.0 and vRealize Business for Cloud. vRealize Automation uses a policy-based framework to automate the deployment of IT services. vRealize Business for Cloud 7.0.1 is one of the features that separates the vRealize Suite from other cloud management products as it employees industry standard metrics to enable you to understand the costs of deploying an application as well as running a service in the cloud verse running it on-premise.

Some of the new features in vRealize Suite 7.0 include:

vRealize Operations 6.2

The new vRealize Operation 6.2 provides an intelligent workload placement capability. It now provides tight integration with Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and can move workloads across servers, clusters or data centers. A new Workload Utilization Dashboard enables you to visualize the workloads.

Enhancements to vRealize Log Insight 3.3 include a new simple Query API for easy integration into existing processes and Web Hooks support for third-party application integration. The new release also provides support for pure IPv6 environments.

New Editions and Portable Licensing Unit model

VMware also introduced a new Standard edition of the vRealize Suite. The Standard edition includes vRealize Log Insight, vRealize Operations and vRealize Business. The VMware vRealize Suite also provides Advanced and Enterprise editions. The Advanced and Enterprise editions possess features for more advanced automated data center operations and application deployment and updating.

With the vRealize Suite VMware provided a new licensing model called the Portable Licensing Unit (PLU). The PLU model enables customers to manage workloads regardless if they run on physical servers, VMware vSphere, third-party hypervisors, or on supported public clouds. Pricing for the vRealize Suite 7 is Standard edition at $3,745 per PLU, Advanced edition at $6,245 per PLU and Enterprise edition at $7,745 per PLU.

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